Why Education Will Not Be Reformed By Government

There are essentially two camps to the public education debate (I’m ignoring the apathetic and the delusional). There is one side that says the current state of public education is not as good as it can be, that we need to reform it, but only to a degree, and the best way to do that is to pump more money into the system and give more power and control to the state. The other side says that public education is essentially a failure, and we need to radically reform or abolish it. In the first camp is the government and those who control it, the establishment political parties, the teachers unions, the graduate schools of education, and the large education publishing companies, who all have a vested interest in the system as it is currently set up. In the second camp are the homeschoolers and unschoolers who want the freedom to raise their kids without interference, and those on the political fringes who are opposed to any form of government control over their children and who do not care to win favor with those in the first camp. This second camp has no vested interest in the system nor do they want any.

The first camp controls public education in America – they control how the money is collected, how it is distributed to the various members of the first camp, how much time kids spend in school, which people have the privilege of teaching our children, the content (or lack thereof) of the “education” provided, and the manner in which they educate (or indoctrinate) the children, also known as pedagogy. Any radical change in the American public education system would threaten the privileged position they hold, and all the money and power that comes along with it. So why would this camp, the one that controls public education, reform it to solve the problems of education which they benefit and profit from? Well, it wouldn’t, and it won’t. Education will not be voluntarily reformed by the government.

Those who disagree might be quick to list off all of the education reform initiatives that we have seen over the past couple of decades, particularly No Child Left Behind and Race to the Top at the federal level, and the expansion of charter schools throughout the nation. If we include increased pay and benefits for teachers, often noted as the solution to our problems, then the argument can be made that the system has been continually reforming itself for decades!

However, the reforms that the government so eagerly touts and advances are often marginal and affect only a small subset of the population (e.g., charter schools, vouchers), as if they’re throwing scraps of food at caged animals. The reforms typically affect kids negatively by browbeating them in an attempt to meet sadly low standards or pass standardized tests which do nothing for children. Worse, many of the so-called reforms do not focus on education at all, but on compensation and benefits (and campaign contributions, union dues, and revenues) for the adults in the first camp that feed off of the system. The education reform initiatives championed by the government typically further centralize decision making in capitol buildings where kids are seen as nothing more than parts of a group represented by an average, as opposed to individual children with individual learning styles and individual needs. They don’t do this because they are merely misguided despite good intentions, but rather they do this because it is how they further entrench their power in a broken but lucrative system.

The government’s first priority is to gain more power and take care of the people who take care of them. The children are never a priority for them; they are but a means to an end. John Taylor Gatto, a renowned public high school teacher turned advocate of ending compulsory schooling, sums up perfectly the problem inherent in public education:

Nearly a century ago, a French sociologist wrote that every institution’s unstated first goal is to survive and grow, not to undertake the mission it has nominally staked out for itself. Thus the first goal of a government postal service is not to deliver the mail; it is to provide protection for its employees and perhaps a modest status ladder for the more ambitious ones. The first goal of a permanent military organization is not to defend national security but to secure, in perpetuity, a fraction of the national wealth to distribute to its personnel.

It was this philistine potential – that teaching the young for pay would inevitably expand into an institution for the protection of teachers, not students – that made Socrates condemn the Sophists so strongly long ago in ancient Greece.

Only one group will ever put the education of children first. Parents.

153 Responses to "
Why Education Will Not Be Reformed By Government "

Great article. I think you’re on to something very universal here. It is absolutely true that entities exist to serve themselves and grow in numbers. This is as true for human/animal/bacterial populations as it is for businesses. Government schooling is non profit, but there are ways to indirectly measure its benefit to society. It certainly serves a (perhaps small) percentage of students, but it serves a larger percentage of teachers/administrators in that it is a jobs program.

Thank you. I don’t like to call government schooling “non-profit”, because the public education system actually destroys value*. At least non-profits theoretically create some sort of value, otherwise people wouldn’t voluntarily funnel their money to those non-profits. Also, I agree that there is a sliver of the population that benefits from “public education”, but they do so at the expense of the rest of society. I don’t believe in making victims (most children) in order to benefit select individuals (a minority of children).

* Just a few of the ways that the public education destroys value: 1) cost to society is far more (in taxes) for the public service of “education” than it would be in a free market, 2) delivers a terrible product that is not worth the inflated cost to taxpayers (by most objective measures), 3) destroys the lives of children, thereby destroying future economic benefit (as if destroying lives weren’t bad enough), 4) prevents the entrance of low-cost education providers that can produce better results (and the jobs that would come along with that).

Any agency of the government definitely exists to protect itself – as a teenage Census worker I was instructed to “Slow down. Don’t you know when we’re done here, we’re all out of a job?”

Why, with a school system that doesn’t measure up to any standards, do we continue to support it? Because it makes some people a lot of money.

Here in Michigan we have a lot of charter schools, a new one going up in my neighborhood. There is a lottery for spots with desperate parents lining up for a spot 8 months before school starts. Other parents drive to another city to get their kids to a ‘decent’ public school. The system is a failure and will not change until there is a cash incentive to succeed – ie. free market schools where parents (and their tuition dollars) can pick and choose the schools that help their children.

Agree fully! Government coercion does not create better products and services at lower costs – it does the opposite. The free market, however, always produces better products and services at lower costs.

[...] real goal of government agencies is not to solve the problems they were created to deal with, but self-preservation and growth. The more money the government is able to confiscate and spend, the more powerful they become. It [...]

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